Certainly getting rid of karma altogether is an option, but I'm not convinced it is the best option. A large number of forums on every topic have some form of karma. When well implemented it can give everyone a good idea of a user's relative contribution to the forum--or lack thereof.

Presumably in the future I could add a feature to the forum where people can individually set whether or not they wish to see messages posted by users that have a certain level of karma. Patient people eager to help absolutely everyone could configure their account to see all messages all the time. Those that only wish to help those that haven't "done wrong" could set their minimum score to 0 so all messages would be seen except those posted by members with negative karma. And, regardless, each user could configure the minimum score a message should have in order to see it regardless of the poster's karma. If you set that at zero you wouldn't see a -3 post regardless of whether a high or low-karma member posted it.

I think karma has the potential of being a useful filter. I think it's just a matter of tuning the system right to make it useful.

Regards,
Craig Steiner